FastMail service plans

FastMail has an extensive help system covering all aspects of the service that all users have full access to.

• Detailed Help
• User contributed wiki
• Indepdendent user discussion forum

In addition, Full and Enhanced subscribers get free technical support via email. Enhanced subscribers' requests are placed in a priority queue and are normally answered in under 12 hours.

As part of the terms of service you agree to when signing up, Guest accounts are not allowed to be used in relation to commercial activities.

Regardless of the account level, you may not use your account for surveys, contests, pyramid schemes, multi-level marketing schemes, chain letters, junk email, spamming or any duplicative or unsolicited messages.

When signing up a Guest account, you are required to provide a backup email address to which we will send an activation email before you can use your account. This is to help us combat email abuse.

Ad Free, Full and Enhanced accounts don't require a backup email address, but we highly recommend it. We only ever use the backup email address for important notifications such as over-quota messages, lost password requests, etc.

All account levels include IMAP access to your email. IMAP is similar to POP3, but much more powerful as it provides a way to "synchronise" what you see at home/work in your email software and what you see through the web interface.

Most email software supports IMAP and we highly recommend IMAP over POP3. More details on IMAP's advantages and how to setup your email client are available in this help page.

IMAP and POP3 access allow you to retrieve email from our servers to your email software, however to send an email from your email software you need to use SMTP.

Almost all ISPs provide access to an SMTP server, so for most people use of our SMTP server will not be necessary (since you can use our server for reading mail with IMAP while your ISP's SMTP server is used for send messages). People who use multiple ISP's but do not want to switch SMTP servers regularly will probably want to use our SMTP server.

Ad Free, Full and Enhanced accounts get access to their very own subdomain. For instance, the account "yourname@fastmail.fm" gets to use the domain "yourname.fastmail.fm". Any email sent to any address in this domain will be sent to the the users mailbox. In addition, email sent to "foldername@yourname.fastmail.fm" will automatically be filed into a folder called "foldername" for you.

These features are great for managing mailing lists, registrations, and for avoiding spam by setting up reject filters for addresses that get on spammers' lists. See this help page for more details.

You can download email from external POP3 accessible email and Hotmail accounts into your account so you can consolidate all your email into one place.

Note: Hotmail have disabled external access to new accounts, and some non-paying old accounts, so if you rely on retrieving email from Hotmail, we recommend testing this first with a free account.

Obviously we'd recommend ditching Hotmail entirely and starting with a new email address with us. While Hotmail tries to lock you into using their web interface, we provide multiple and open ways (IMAP, POP, etc) to access your email.

Aliases allow you to create multiple different email addresses, all of which direct email to your account. This can be useful for keeping business/work separate, or as a way to reduce spam. By creating a number of aliases and signing up for different services with different aliases, if one of the addresses starts getting lots of spam, you can just disable/remove that alias. For more details, see this help page.

Aliases also provide a security mechanism. If you signup your account with an obscure name, and then create an alias and only send email with your alias as the From address, and only tell people about your alias, then no-one will even know your account name, and thus cannot even attempt to guess your accounts password because they don't know the account name.

Ad Free can sign up for one additional address, which is their existing username in an additional domain. Full accounts get 6 aliases, which can be different names in any of of our domains (dictionary words and common first/surnames are not permitted). Enhanced accounts can have 30 aliases in any of our domains.

Virtual domains and aliases allow you to use your own domain to receive email at. Details of that are below.

Own domain aliases/domains (or virtual aliases/virtual domains) allow you to use your own domain for receiving email to your account. See this help page for more details.

Note that we currently don't support separate accounts in your domain for individual accounts. You can however signup multiple regular accounts, and then direct email from a particular name to each account. For example:

If you want multiple accounts in your own domain, you should check out our Family and Business account features.

On signup or upgrade, Full and Enhanced accounts receive a bonus bandwidth quota. If you go above your monthly quota, the excess is taken from your bonus. Unlike the regular monthly quota, any bonus not used in a month is rolled over to the next month.

DAV (or WebDAV) is a way for external software (called a DAV client) to upload and download files from your file storage area. Many DAV clients exist, and most allow you to make your file storage appear as just another drive on your computer allowing you to easily drag and drop files between your file storage area and your local computer.

See this help page for more details.

FTP is another way for external software to upload and download files from your file storage area. See this help page for more details.

You can easily publish files from your file storage to a website. You have complete control over which files are accessible and what pathname/hostname they are accessible at. There is also a photo gallery service, which will automatically turn a directory of uploaded files into a simple photo gallery friends can see and access.

Note that we currently don't support any scripting or database services, this is just a basic hosting service to show files/directories.

We provide a highly customisable mail filtering interface that allows you to; discard, file into a folder, forward to another address, send notifications to another address, setup an auto-responder, or send SMS's to phone based on any set of message criteria. This can all be done through a straight forward web interface.

For advanced users, we provide the ability to directly edit a "sieve script". Sieve is a mail filtering language that allows you to setup arbitrary complex filtering actions. Fore more information on sieve, see this page.